Roxbury Poetry Festival invites people to reimagine their neighborhood and embrace the written word

If Valduvino Gonçalves lived in his dream world and could change anything about Roxbury, he would add more ice cream shops. Okay, and more affordable housing and renovated school spaces. But the first thing that popped into Gonçalves’s mind was ice cream.

Ice cream shops and neighborhood restaurants need to be more plentiful in the neighborhood, Gonçalves told a crowd of about 25 Saturday afternoon while speaking on a panel called “Dreamscape: Future of Roxbury,” hosted by the Roxbury Poetry Festival.

“We don’t have a lot of family-style restaurants where people can gather,” said Gonçalves, who is a student development counselor at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science. And that makes it harder for community members to get together, he said.

Gonçalves’s panel, which focused on imagining creative solutions and goals for Roxbury, was just one community-led event at the poetry festival. Other workshops included introductions to screenwriting and journalism, studying wordplay in poetry, and understanding and defining spatial justice. The event was scheduled to conclude with a poetry slam Saturday evening when a winner will receive a book contract.

The festival, organized by Boston’s poet laureate Porsha Olayiwola and the mayor’s office of arts and culture, was held at the Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building in Nubian Square and featured a poetry slam and talks by poets Ruth Lilly Fellow and Nate Marshall. During the lunch hour, Marshall, who is from the South Side of Chicago, read a series of poems about another man named Nate Marshall, who is a white supremacist.

Olayiwola, 35, who was appointed the city’s poet laureate in 2019, said her goal for the festival was to showcase local and national talent.

“I just want people to walk away inspired, and feel fed,” she said in an interview. “There needs to be freedom for people to be creative.”

Olayiwola said the city was “exceptional” in funding and finding resources for the festival, which is held every two years.

“The community here is really important,” she said. “I’m huge on everything being completely free to the community.”

Ashley Osinubi, 40, attended the dreamscape panel on the future of Roxbury and said she “thoroughly enjoyed” the conversations.

“It’s important to hear from others in the community and to come together and be proactive,” she said in an interview.

Osinubi was born in Mattapan, but said she spent a significant amount of time in Roxbury when she was growing up. She and her husband bought a home in the neighborhood in 2018.

“It’s important to network within our own community,” she said. “Our futures are all connected.”

Though an ice cream shop wouldn’t fix every issue facing the neighborhood, creating spaces for the community is important, the dreamscape panelists said.

“I would really like to see Roxbury open spaces where adults can play,” said panelist Renata Caines, a community organizer and educator. “We need young people that look like us to stay and be joyful.”

Climate change was also a topic of conversation for the dreamscape panel.

“We need to be investing in Roxbury to make sure we’re climate resilient,” panelist Lacee Satcher, assistant professor of sociology and environmental studies at Boston College said.

Satcher said she and her family moved to the neighborhood two years ago and one issue that surprised her, she said, was the lack of covered bus benches.

Changes like planting trees to increase the number of shaded areas are also vital to increasing climate resiliency and decreasing the temperature in the neighborhood, she said.

Besides panels, other events at the festival included interactive workshops, like one taught by Boston artist-in-residence Nakia Hill entitled “How We Take Up Space: on spatial justice.”

Hill invited participants to share their thoughts on different issues, such as how they take up space in their communities and neighborhoods. She played music while participants wrote in notebooks about how they perceived themselves and others in various spaces.

“I want us to reimagine what spatial justice looks like,” she told the group of 20 participants. “What does taking up space look like for you?”

Other workshops, like “Culture as Container” and “Intro to Screenwriting” allowed participants to immerse themselves into different creative spaces. That, according to poet laureate Olayiwola, was one of the festival’s goals.

Zaryah Qareeb, a 19-year-old Roxbury native majoring in film at Emerson College, served as a volunteer for the festival. She said she believes the event shined a light on an important community of artists.

“I’ve been able to learn more and more about my community,” Qareeb said. “Their passion is definitely rubbing off on me.”

Elllie Wolfe can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @elliew0lfe.